I made a living selling on Amazon about 15 years ago. It all came crashing down when they held all of my money (around $50,000) and had to 'investigate'.

Nothing ever came of it and they released my money, but banned my seller account for 10 years.

It was actually a good thing. I started my own site and made a good living for a decade. Covid shutdown the business.

Building a business on Amazon is a mistake.

It seems like there are still healthy ways to do it, I see some products sold by third party sellers that clearly are real small businesses. I google them find their real site and sometimes they offer pricing better than what they can offer after amazon fees etc.

I see that as the absolute best approach for someone like that, leverage the platform but don't allow it to be your entire online presence.

My own use case was sadly, just leveraging the platform and as all the margins tighten not only on the amazon platform itself but on shipping costs, it just gets tougher and tougher. Happy for the experiences they offered me freedom wise, but also happy to be moving on.